GMG - Las Vegas Weekly

September 12, 2013

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AS WE SEE IT…
> MISSING THE
VIEW Steve Friess
may no longer live
in Las Vegas, but
he's never stopped
thinking about it.
VEGAS ON MY MIND
CHECKING IN
Steve Friess returns to the Weekly—to offer an outsider's
perspective on Sin City BY STEVE FRIE SS
renewal demanded new scenery and challenges
and, also, my husband had come to despise the
desert climate. Once we were in motion, he'd never
sanction a move back.
Yet I never stopped thinking about Las Vegas
and its singular place in America and international
lore. I never stopped reading the Review-Journal or
the Sun, I never declined an opportunity to return
to the erudite air of KNPR, I never ceased trying to
educate—fruitless though it usually was—ignorant
Midwest and East Coast elitists who took simplistic
and insulting views of the Strip and the millions of
real-world Americans who love it. After the fellowship, I took a job as a senior writer at Politico in
Washington, D.C., and found many excuses to write
about Nevada, most notably in covering the ﬂailing effort to move forward a federal law to govern
online gambling.
LAS VEGAS PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE MARCUS
So! What'd I miss?
Two years ago, I abandoned this space. This
week, I'm reclaiming it for a couple of times a
month. Hide the kiddies.
Back then, I also shut down my blog, stopped
podcasting, dumped my worthless house and bolted
for Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I'd landed an awesome one-year fellowship for mid-career journalists
at the University of Michigan. Mine was a different
departure than many writers who have moved in
that I openly ached for all I would miss while making no I'll-be-back pretense.
I waxed poetic in my 2011 valedictory about the
special tint of the Nevada sky, the bumpy curve of
southbound U.S. 95 just past Downtown, the heartrending distance I'd be putting between myself and
the lovely friends who knew me better than my
own family. Still, my gut told me my own creative
After 14 months, I bafﬂed my editors and colleagues by leaving Politico. It just wasn't my style of
journalism, but more signiﬁcantly I missed writing
about anything and everything that interested me.
And that included Las Vegas.
So my husband and I compromised. We'd leave
D.C. and return to Ann Arbor, where he had become
so infected by Blue fever that we now own a U of
M shower curtain, dog leash, Jenga, Mr. Potato
Head and game-day yard blow-up, among other
Michiganalia. In exchange, I will travel to Vegas
whenever I want, as I will later this month for the
Global Gaming Expo.
It may seem absurd for a columnist focused on
Las Vegas to be located elsewhere, but you readers
need a sober, outsider point of view as much as the
rest of the country could stand to rethink its obnoxious, limited perspective of you. Also, it's worth noting that the two ﬁnest and most valuable podcasts
about the city—The Vegas Gang and Five Hundy
By Midnight—originate from Santa Barbara and
Minnesota, respectively. The most signiﬁcant blog,
too, is Vegas Tripping, beamed to you from SoCal.
So, with all that said, I ask again: What'd I miss?
Like a daytime soap you can step away from and
return to unconfused at almost any time, it seems on
the surface the town is largely as I left it. The empty
Fontainebleau still towers as a mocking monument
to boomtown hubris, the region is no closer to a
professional sports franchise or meaningful tax
reform, the Monorail somehow continues to glide
God-knows-who along the backside of nowhere and
an oddly romantic image of the Osmond siblings still
covers the front of the Flamingo. As I predicted back
then, the Era of the Next Little Thing continues
apace, the only change to the Vegas skyline being
the sprouting of that infernal Ferris wheel.
There are some surprises, I admit. The new
mayor has actually failed to make any nationally
amusing gaffe. Holly Madison is now an ofﬁcial
MILF. Sam Nazarian actually seems to be going
forward with the transformation of the Sahara as
the SLS. And Jim Murren ﬁnally called out Sheldon
Adelson for his less-than-collegial bluster.
As you can see, I'm a bit pent up. There's much
to say. As Rachel Maddow loves to say, watch this
space.
So! Didja miss me?
Steve Friess is a freelance journalist based in Ann Arbor,
Michigan. His work has appeared in the New York Times,
Newsweek and USA Today, among many other outlets.
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